Application of PHT-splines in bending and vibration analysis of cracked Kirchhoff–Love plates

In this work, we present an eXtended Geometry Independent Field approximaTion (X–GIFT) formulation for cracked Kirchhoff–Love plates. The plate geometry is modeled by Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) while the solution is approximated by Polynomial Splines over Hierarchical T-meshes (PHT-splines) and enriched by the Heaviside function and crack tip asymptotic expansions. The adaptive refinement is driven by a recovery-based error estimator. The formulation is employed for bending and vibration analysis. We compare different strategies for refinement, enrichment and evaluation of fracture parameters. The obtained results are shown to be in a good agreement with the reference solutions

A discontinuous Galerkin formulation for nonlinear analysis of multilayered shells refined theories

A novel pure penalty discontinuous Galerkin method is proposed for the geometrically nonlinear analysis of multilayered composite plates and shells, modelled via high-order refined theories. The approach allows to build different two-dimensional equivalent single layer structural models, which are obtained by expressing the covariant components of the displacement field through-the-thickness via Taylor’s polynomial expansion of different order. The problem governing equations are deduced starting from the geometrically nonlinear principle of virtual displacements in a total Lagrangian formulation. They are addressed with a pure penalty discontinuous Galerkin method using Legendre polynomials trial functions. The resulting nonlinear algebraic system is solved by a Newton–Raphson arc-length linearization scheme. Numerical tests involving plates and shells are proposed to validate the method, by comparison with literature benchmark problems and finite element solutions, and to assess its features. The obtained results demonstrate the accuracy of the method as well as the effectiveness of high-order elements

Isogeometric analysis based on rational splines over hierarchical T-mesh and alpha finite element method for structural analysis

This thesis presents two new methods in finite elements and isogeometric analysis for structural analysis. The first method proposes an alternative alpha finite element method using triangular elements. In this method, the piecewise constant strain field of linear triangular finite element method models is enhanced by additional strain terms with an adjustable parameter a, which results in an effectively softer stiffness formulation compared to a linear triangular element. In order to avoid the transverse shear locking of Reissner-Mindlin plates analysis the alpha finite element method is coupled with a discrete shear gap technique for triangular elements to significantly improve the accuracy of the standard triangular finite elements. The basic idea behind this element formulation is to approximate displacements and rotations as in the standard finite element method, but to construct the bending, geometrical and shear strains using node-based smoothing domains. Several numerical examples are presented and show that the alpha FEM gives a good agreement compared to several other methods in the literature. Second method, isogeometric analysis based on rational splines over hierarchical T-meshes (RHT-splines) is proposed. The RHT-splines are a generalization of Non-Uniform Rational B-splines (NURBS) over hierarchical T-meshes, which is a piecewise bicubic polynomial over a hierarchical T-mesh. The RHT-splines basis functions not only inherit all the properties of NURBS such as non-negativity, local support and partition of unity but also more importantly as the capability of joining geometric objects without gaps, preserving higher order continuity everywhere and allow local refinement and adaptivity. In order to drive the adaptive refinement, an efficient recovery-based error estimator is employed. For this problem an imaginary surface is defined. The imaginary surface is basically constructed by RHT-splines basis functions which is used for approximation and interpolation functions as well as the construction of the recovered stress components. Numerical investigations prove that the proposed method is capable to obtain results with higher accuracy and convergence rate than NURBS results

Adaptive isogeometric methods with C1C^1 (truncated) hierarchical splines on planar multi-patch domains

Isogeometric analysis is a powerful paradigm which exploits the high smoothness of splines for the numerical solution of high order partial differential equations. However, the tensor-product structure of standard multivariate B-spline models is not well suited for the representation of complex geometries, and to maintain high continuity on general domains special constructions on multi-patch geometries must be used. In this paper we focus on adaptive isogeometric methods with hierarchical splines, and extend the construction of $C^1$ isogeometric spline spaces on multi-patch planar domains to the hierarchical setting. We introduce a new abstract framework for the definition of hierarchical splines, which replaces the hypothesis of local linear independence for the basis of each level by a weaker assumption. We also develop a refinement algorithm that guarantees that the assumption is fulfilled by $C^1$ splines on certain suitably graded hierarchical multi-patch mesh configurations, and prove that it has linear complexity. The performance of the adaptive method is tested by solving the Poisson and the biharmonic problems

Computational Engineering

This Workshop treated a variety of finite element methods and applications in computational engineering and expanded their mathematical foundation in engineering analysis. Among the 53 participants were mathematicians and engineers with focus on mixed and nonstandard finite element schemes and their applications

Concurrently coupled solid shell-based adaptive multiscale method for fracture

Artículo Open Access en el sitio web del editor. Pago por publicar en abierto.A solid shell-based adaptive atomistic–continuum numerical method is herein proposed to simulate complex crack growth patterns in thin-walled structures. A hybrid solid shell formulation relying on the combined use of the enhanced assumed strain (EAS) and the assumed natural strain (ANS) methods has been considered to efficiently model the material in thin structures at the continuum level. The phantom node method (PNM) is employed to model the discontinuities in the bulk. The discontinuous solid shell element is then concurrently coupled with a molecular statics model placed around the crack tip. The coupling between the coarse scale and the fine scale is realized through the use of ghost atoms, whose positions are interpolated from the coarse scale solution and enforced as boundary conditions to the fine scale model. In the proposed numerical scheme, the fine scale region is adaptively enlarged as the crack propagates and the region behind the crack tip is adaptively coarsened in order to reduce the computation costs. An energy criterion is used to detect the crack tip location. All the atomistic simulations are carried out using the LAMMPS software. A computational framework has been developed in MATLAB to trigger LAMMPS through system command. This allows a two way interaction between the coarse and fine scales in MATLAB platform, where the boundary conditions to the fine region are extracted from the coarse scale, and the crack tip location from the atomistic model is transferred back to the continuum scale. The developed framework has been applied to study crack growth in the energy minimization problems. Inspired by the influence of fracture on current–voltage characteristics of thin Silicon photovoltaic cells, the cubic diamond lattice structure of Silicon is used to model the material in the fine scale region, whilst the Tersoff potential function is employed to model the atom–atom interactions. The versatility and robustness of the proposed methodology is demonstrated by means of several fracture applications.Unión Europea ERC 306622Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad DPI2012-37187, MAT2015-71036-P y MAT2015-71309-PJunta de Andalucía P11-TEP-7093 y P12-TEP -105

Phase field modeling and computer implementation: A review

This paper presents an overview of the theories and computer implementation aspects of phase field models (PFM) of fracture. The advantage of PFM over discontinuous approaches to fracture is that PFM can elegantly simulate complicated fracture processes including fracture initiation, propagation, coalescence, and branching by using only a scalar field, the phase field. In addition, fracture is a natural outcome of the simulation and obtained through the solution of an additional differential equation related to the phase field. No extra fracture criteria are needed and an explicit representation of a crack surface as well as complex track crack procedures are avoided in PFM for fracture, which in turn dramatically facilitates the implementation. The PFM is thermodynamically consistent and can be easily extended to multi-physics problem by 'changing' the energy functional accordingly. Besides an overview of different PFMs, we also present comparative numerical benchmark examples to show the capability of PFMs

Isogeometric analysis with local adaptivity based on a posteriori error estimation for elastodynamics

IsoGeometric Analysis (IGA) was invented to integrate the Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) into a unified process. According to the recent research, IGA performs a super convergence in case of vibration, and especially, it perfectly addresses the Gibbs phenomenon (fluctuation) occurring in discrete spectra when using standard Finite Element Method (FEM). However, due to the tensor-product structure of Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS), it fails to achieve the local refinement, which restricts its application to engineering fields performing local characteristics that require local refinement, such as sharp geometrical feature and/or varying material properties. In this context, the first goal of thesis is to extend the recently proposed paradigm, called Geometry Independent Field approximaTion (GIFT), to be applied in the scheme of dynamics. The GIFT methodology allows geometry of structure to be described within the NURBS provided directly by the existing CAD software, and solution field to be approximated by the Polynomial splines over Hierarchical Tmeshes (PHT) with the feature of local refinement meanwhile. Subsequently, in the framework of GIFT, an adaptivity technique based on hierarchical a posteriori error estimation on the modal vector is established for the free vibration of thick plate. The proposed adaptive mesh achieves a faster convergence than uniform refinement. Especially, the employment of Modal Assurance Criterion (MAC)-style strategy is able to better determine the modal correspondence between coarse and fine discretizations than Frequency Error Criterion (FEC) method. Furthermore, based on hierarchical a posteriori error estimation strategy, three types of adaptivity algorithms are constructed to deal with the space-time refinement. Specially, unidirectional multi-level space-time adaptive GIFT/Newmark (UM-STAGN) well catches stress wave propagation but fails in error information transfer. Energybased space-time adaptive GIFT/Newmark (E-STAGN) can reassess the error but cannot uncover the source of error. Dual weighted residual adaptive GIFT/Newmark (DWR-STAGN) methods are error-sensitive so that it leads to the best convergence among these three approaches